The USC Casden Institute proudly presents a Casden Conversation

"The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War"

Featuring Best-Selling Author and Two Time Finalist David Nasaw and Dr. Paul Lerner, USC Professor of History

Date: February 7, 2021 Time: 4PM - 5:15PM PST

Register HERE

The cessation of hostilities in Europe did not end the sufering of the millions of eastern Europeans who had been displaced by war. The Last Million is the story of the displaced persons left behind in Germany at war's end: Jews who had survived the Holocaust, Eastern European forced and slave laborers deported against their will to Germany, and collaborators and war criminals who had fled their homelands in advance of the Red Army. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in quasi- incarceration in camps in Germany, while the nations of the world debated what to do with them.

We too easily and wrongly assume that once the war was over, the nations and peoples of the world opened their hearts and their doors to the Holocaust survivors, but that was not the case. In the immediate postwar period, it was far easier for former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, now promoting themselves as anti-Soviet, anti-Communist activists, to gain entry as immigrants to the US, the UK, and elsewhere, than it would be for the Jewish survivors.

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Nonfiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Paul Lerner is a Historian of Modern Germany and Central Europe with particular interest in the history of the human sciences, Jewish history, gender, and the history and theory of consumer culture. He has written on the history of psychiatry, specifically on hysteria and trauma in political, cultural and economic context in the years around World War I in Germany, and he recently published a book on the reception and representation of department stores and modern forms of marketing and consumption in Germany and Central Europe. Entitled "The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1949," the book appeared with Cornell University Press in Spring 2015.

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